Next week, the international community will gather at Habitat III - the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development - to discuss important urban challenges as the world’s cities grow at an unprecedented rate.

Today, 54% of people live in cities and towns. Cities can be magnets for population growth and offer opportunities for jobs and social empowerment; but they can also be a source of congestion, exclusion and impoverishment. Which path of urban growth will prevail depends, in large part, on the quality and availability of mobility solutions. Transport is a structuring element of cities.

The reality of mobility in today’s cities is alarming— especially when measured against the four criteria that define sustainable mobility.

Public-private partnerships fit well into many sectors and industries, most obviously infrastructure and social services. But I never connected PPPs to the life insurance sector until I read a recent online interview with Andreas Gruber, the Chief Investment Officer of Allianz, a German insurance and asset management company. In the interview, Gruber gives a lucid assessment of PPPs and why they are important to Allianz.

Some of you may recall my colleague Holly Krambeck’s blogging about the Egypt Vehicle Scrapping and Recycling Project, or VSRP, as it is affectionately also known. Holly’s old posts are here and here. The project would ambitiously modernize public transportation fleets in Egypt, starting with the taxi fleet of Cairo, and expand to include other modes of public transport too, including minibuses and buses.

Ethiopia, the single largest African coffee producer and the world’s fifth largest, is commonly considered to be the birthplace of coffee. It’s hardly a surprise that when you survey the landscape of Ethiopia’s Oromia region, an area the size of Italy, it is bespeckled with native Coffea arabica farms.

There is a lot for Bangladesh to celebrate in the latest World Bank research on global poverty and inequality.
The new report, entitled “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality”, uses revised data to give a more accurate estimate of how many poor people live in Bangladesh. What the report shows is that 18.5 percent of the population was poor in 2010 compared with 44.2 percent in 1991.

This is a major achievement that will receive global recognition on October 17 when the World Bank Group marks End Poverty Day with the Bangladesh people at an event in Dhaka.

Today I joined leaders and representatives from 70 countries and 20 international organizations and agencies at the Brussels Conference on Afghanistan. Together with its development partners, the World Bank Group pledged its continued support to the Afghan people and outlined a course of action to help all Afghans realize their dream of living in peace and prosperity.

Afghanistan has come a long way since 2001 and has made much progress under extremely challenging circumstances: life expectancy has increased from 44 to 60 years, maternal mortality has decreased by more than three quarters and, from almost none in 2001, the country now counts 18 million mobile phone subscribers.

Yet, enormous challenges remain as nearly 40 percent of Afghans live in poverty and almost 70 percent of the population is illiterate. This is made worse by growing insecurity and the return of 5.8 million refugees and 1.2 million internally displaced people. Much also remains to create jobs for the nearly 400,000 people entering the labor market each year.

To that end, here are five priorities we need to address to ensure a more prosperous and more secure future for all Afghans:

Cities are home to more than half of the world’s population, consume two-thirds of the world’s energy, and produce 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And this trend will only continue: by 2050, 66% of the 10 billion people living on earth will be urban dwellers.

As we mark World Habitat Day, these numbers remind us of a serious fact: while rapid urbanization brings tremendous opportunities for growth and prosperity, it has also posed unprecedented challenges to our cities—and the people who live in them.

Chief among these challenges is meeting fast-growing demand for infrastructure and basic services such as affordable housing and well-connected transport systems, as well as jobs—especially for the nearly one billion urban poor who are disproportionately affected by climate change and adverse socioeconomic conditions.

Such messages teach us how to keep hazards away from people (reducing existing risks) as well as how to keep people away from hazards (avoid creating new risks). On my latest trip to Japan, we hosted government officials from Armenia, Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan as part of an experts’ visit focusing on disaster risk management, acting on Japan’s rich culture of passing on such decisive messages to future generations.

“There is no time to waste. Today will take us one step closer to bringing the Paris Agreement into force this year,” the UN chief stressed. With the recent announcement that India is committed to ratifying the Paris Agreement, it looks like it is increasingly a done deal.